SCORES of post offices in North Wales face being driven out of business under secret plans being drawn up to strip them of most of the services they provide.

The Daily Post has learned that Post Office Ltd has put together a blueprint to re-classify post offices into five separate categories based on the amount of money they make each year.

The vast majority will be classed as “locals” – and deprived of the opportunity to sell goods and services including insurance, motor vehicle licences and foreign exchange.

Yesterday, subpostmasters in North Wales reacted with disbelief at the news, saying it will wreck their livelihoods.

Vanessa Griffiths, 55, who runs the Henllan Post Office in Henllan near Denbigh with her husband David, also 55, said the proposals as they stand will put them out of business.

“We have a basic salary and the rest is done on sales. They will stop us doing road tax, vehicle licensing, anything financial, foreign currency, everything will be taken off us. At the moment our salary, this is how bad it is, is only £5,000 a year. To make our salary up to about £17,000 a year we promote the post office and sell products like tax, insurance, foreign currency, financial things, investments,” she said.

“All we will be doing in the future is the post office card account and mail services, we would drop 75%. I got the letter today and a gentleman from another post office rang me up and said ‘you need to read it, we have got problems, we won’t survive.’

“This is all quite frightening because if this happens, you are not going to have any small post offices in North Wales, we are reasonably successful, but there are not a lot of post offices like us.

“If this comes in, we wouldn’t have a choice but to close, we have got the retail side of the business but it is the post office that brings in the footfall.”

Peter Montgomery, spokesman for the National Federation of Subpostmasters in North Wales, said many post offices will lose around three-quarters of their income – leaving them with no choice but to shut. His own branch at Ffrith near Prestatyn, which he runs with wife Jennifer will be one of them, he said.

“The Post Office are proposing a new structure which is absolutely abhorrent to me. The public are totally unaware of this – the vast majority of post offices will become what they call Local or Basic post offices.

“They want businesses to be supporting the post office. They don’t want stand-alone post offices, they say it costs too much to support them and that is the problem. I am a stand-alone post office and there is probably 4,000 to 5,000 nationwide.

“One of the things they are going to do is to take out core payments – it is a basic payment which has been reduced over the years – the Post Office definitely wants to get rid of this, it is a payment we have always looked upon to help cover the overheads. All they want to do is pay us for the transactions we make.”

“I am livid about it all – I could lose my home over this because I have no subsidiary business other than small mounted cards and stationery. If they remove my core payments, I will lose about a quarter to a third of my pay overnight. A lot of post offices will go out of business without doubt.”

The revelations of what is intended for the Post Office network have leaked out from a breakaway group within the National Federation of Subpostmasters which accuse their own Federation of being part of a stitch-up with Post Office Ltd and Vince Cable’s Business Department. The Daily Post has obtained a copy of a letter sent out to sub post offices across Britain from the vice president of the National Federation, Pritpal Singh.

In it he details how, as a result of negotiations between the Federation and Post Office Ltd, branch offices will be split into five categories.

Mr Singh notes: “Thousands of closures will be inevitable and as they hand in their keys, it will be the subpostmasters, and not the Government who will be blamed for this.”

Yesterday, a Post Office spokeswoman refused to be drawn on the claims and would only say: “The Post Office is firmly committed to doing everything possible to create a long-term, sustainable future for the branch network and, crucially, the subpostmasters who run the overwhelming majority of branches.”

A spokesman for Vince Cable’s Business Department called the claims “ill-informed scaremongering.”

“The Government has put in place £1.3 billion of new funding for the Post Office and pledged that there will be no programme of closures.

"Decisions about how to categorise individual Post Offices are made by the company in consultation with the NFSP – the Postal Services Bill has no impact on these decisions.”

l The Postal Services Bill will begin its second reading in the House of Lords today.